Infant’s First “Tweet” Isn’t Vocal: it’s the Start of Her Online Presence, Until Her “Right to be Forgotten”

Considered by some to be trending is the impulse by new parents to launch their newborns into the digital world. An increasingly common way is to establish an email account for the infant which parents, and other family, can use to send email and photos to the baby for future reference. It could be seen as a digital scrapbook of childhood. It is surely a digital footprint – maybe the baby’s first. According to a recent report by the New York Times, some parents are registering their babies for URLs and accounts on Instagram and Tumblr “within hours of their birth.” This isn’t everyone’s cup of tea but it does raise the issue of a child’s digital identity. Parents have plenty to say about that identity if they begin and sustain it for the child.

Babies online is part of being digitally native: these days it all starts very early for kids. The same New York Times story tells us that “most children born in the last 10 years will have been online hundreds, if not thousands, of times by the time they become self-aware.” For many of us that is a staggering idea. What is the cumulative portrait resulting from thousands of photos, posts, and messages for a kid by the time they reach maturity? What implications for the digitized young on admission to schools, to jobs, to their professional lives?

There are societal trade-offs between the freedom of expression and the protection of individual privacy. This is especially so for the privacy of a minor. In the US, the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act establishes rules about soliciting information on minors. However, as the New York Times points out, parents may be misrepresenting their kids’ ages to register them on, for example, Facebook. Or they may give their parental permission to young children who want to participate early. That could mean that third parties are getting access to minors for targeted advertising and “big data” purposes.

It is not a coincidence that as concern heightens about lasting digital reputations, so too do ideas for erasing one’s digital past. It has been suggested that minors could be allowed to cast off their online presence when they come of age by applying for a new digital identity. This could give the imprudent young a way to start adulthood with a clean slate – one without evidence of various underage bad choices. More than some regrettable hair styles of teenage years, drunken photos or sexting could get wiped away. Does that approach make bad behavior more likely when kids risk less reputational penalty? Or is it a way that technology can be used to further protect minors?

In Europe, eliminating the digital past is hotly debated. The European Union is working up its initiative known as “the right to be forgotten” which enables individuals to delete their personal information from internet service providers. The impetus is to handle problems stemming from social media but erasure can get far more extensive. According to The Guardian, "In Silicon Valley, there's a lot of venture capital going into tech companies that can achieve erasure of data. There's a lot of demand in the market for cleansing online information."

On the other hand, the ‘right to be forgotten’ may become problematic if, for example, a political figure wants to eliminate evidence of poor judgment, or if someone maliciously poses to erase information on another person. Web-savvy parents may be christening their children with their own websites but not to worry: by the time a newborn reaches adulthood, she can probably erase it all later.